Breaking Open to the Light

Being broken open isn’t the same as being broken. In fact, it may be the surest way to illuminate the vast universe that lies within. There is so much beneath the surface that we haven’t yet met, much less been intimate with. Healing waits to enter here with tenderness and patience, and there is so much to heal. There are terrors left behind tucked into hidden corners, never receiving word that their purpose was exhausted long ago. Cries of ancestors carried through generations echo just waiting to be let out in a howl of long buried sorrow—now seen, now heard, now released. Messages etched on bone become things you believe about yourself that keep you small and have you thinking you might even be frail. There are little hauntings everywhere, in the belly, near the heart and caught in the throat—harm doled out and abuse absorbed…unspoken regret and rage whose time it has come to be let go.

Sometimes when you’ve spent so much of your life holding yourself together so that secrets don’t slip out and weaknesses don’t unravel carefully woven illusions of control, the cracking can initially feel like coming apart and your first reaction may be to try and corset everything together again. The truth is, though, it is not so much that there is planning and busying and fixing to be done as depths of emotion to be sat with, looked upon and known. In this way we make room for it to just be so that it can eventually be gone. When all of this old holding and carrying and protecting is cleared away, space expands, energy flows and light floods everything. 

Six months ago, on the occasion of the winter solstice, I revived this long sleeping blog. I wasn’t sure why, for the original intent seemed to have played itself out. Still, this space seemed important and there appeared to be stories yet to tell, though it wasn’t even necessarily with the intent to reach some specific audience. The darkest day seemed appropriate to begin my tale of grief because, though there was much cold and dark to come, it was all most certainly leading, if only incrementally, to light. And, so, I began.  

Some of the writing had been done in writing classes where I found compassion and community and readers for my words. I’d done so much work that I didn’t imagine there was still so much more to come out of me. Led by intuition, I wrote what surfaced, and every time I felt a little lighter and a little more mended. Then, suddenly, I realized the audience was…me.   

I’m still mending and I’m still practicing and learning, but I am so much lighter. This is what I believe I know so far: 

Though everything that happens inside of us—all that emotion—belongs, it is very likely that we are also carrying the sorrows and the disappointments and fears that have been handed off to us by others who didn’t know how to carry them. We don’t have to hold that for anyone else, though. It can be laid down or it can be handed back, with love and compassion, and we can return to work of our Selves. 

Once we sort out what is ours and what is someone else’s and we clean out what we never asked for, we create space, not for anxiety and not for depression, but for the full range of emotion that informs us and guides us and then moves on.

We do not have to stay sad to remember and honor everything we have lost. We can invite joy in without fear when we understand that it, too, will eventually slip out but will always come back again.

We are not expected to have it all figured out. We can not linger sorrowfully on what we did not know or what we could have done differently when we were doing the best that we could. 

We do not have to wait for perfection or complete understanding or a complete plan to take the next step. In fact, we can’t wait—there is not time. It is in the effort and the practice that the learning and greater knowing grow. 

We are, right this very moment, worthy of love and respect and being held and being seen and being wanted, just as we are. 

Now, having been broken open, I understand the universe within so much better, while also still being curiously drawn to the mystery of what now…what next…? All I know is that there are strings of stardust everywhere. By the light of my being—my internal luminosity–I will use that stardust to stitch together all the moments and emotions and people and curiosities and insights that hold me, light filled for being broken open, back together again.

Happy Summer Solstice-ish. I had been working on this post with the plan to publish it on the Solstice, but I was in a boat on a river with my Dad celebrating Father’s Day and then we had dinner and then we got ice cream and then it got late. That’s where I was supposed to be.